Petros, Patriarch of Alexandria and the leader of Africa's Orthodox Christians, died with 16 others when their Chinook military helicopter plunged into the sea 20 miles off the monastic state of Mount
Athos in north Greece on Saturday.

Top military officials admitted a breakdown in communications and delays in launching a search and rescue operation.

"There are people who need to answer to the delays in communicating the loss of the helicopter, and responsibility lies with mechanisms within the armed forces" Greece's Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis
said in a news conference on Sunday.

"For this reason, Defence Minister Spilios Spiliotopoulos has already asked the chief of the Hellenic Air Force General Staff to hand in his resignation."

"The Defence Minister also handed in his resignation to me for reasons of honour, but it was not accepted".

Greece's Sunday press focused on the accident on their front pages, noting many unanswered questions surrounding it.

Ethnos said there were 'two tragic questions about the fatal flight: what brought down the safest ever chopper and why was the rescue operation launched two hours after the helicopter went off the
radars".

The Patriarchate of Alexandria, established in 42 A.D. by Saint Mark the Evangelist, one of the first disciples of Christ, is second in the Orthodox Church honorific rank after the Ecumenical
Patriarchate in Istanbul - formerly Constantinople and capital of the Byzantine empire.

Alexandria's patriarch heads the Orthodox Church in Africa, ministering to a flock of around 100,000 Africans and 150,000 mainly ethnic Greeks. The Orthodox church claims about 250 million followers worldwide.

The Metropolitans Chrysostomos of Carthage and Irinaios of Pilousio, the bishop of Madagascar Nektarios and three other clerics including the Patriarch's chief secretary also died.

Source: swisspolitics.org

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